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“Did you make that yourself?” Dustin asked the tattooed guy, trying to break the ice. No one had spoken to him since he'd walked in.

“No. I found it on the sidewalk.”

Dustin couldn't figure out if this was meant to be a joke. He laughed, deciding to hedge his bets. A guy with a bloodstained cotton ball in one nostril asked him who he was.

“We're, um, friends of Breakfast's.”

“Just don't steal any records,” the guy said.

“Look,” Suzie said, pointing. “Porn Man's at it again.”

Dustin peered out the window, which afforded an open view into the darkened condo across the way. A big TV flickered at the back of the room: two women on their knees, giving someone a blow job. Dustin had the weird desire to shield Taz's eyes. In front of the TV, visible in the murky blue light, was the back of an empty couch.

“I see his hand!” the guy with the cotton ball said. “We have a sighting.”

“There's someone in there?” Dustin asked.

“He lies there naked on the couch,” Suzie explained, “fast-forwarding to the good parts.”

Dustin walked into the kitchen. Breakfast was hanging out by the sink, sharing a bottle of Old Crow with the beautiful girl. She introduced herself as Yissel, as if she'd never seen him before. In
the corner, hunched over an old typewriter, sat a guy who looked to be in his thirties. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket and no shirt. There was a hollow place in the middle of his chest, a bony, cavelike dent below his sternum, large enough to wedge in a tennis ball.

“Want a misfortune cookie?” Yissel said.

“Sure.”

She reached into a bowl on the kitchen table and handed Dustin a yellow fortune cookie. He broke it open and pulled out an asymmetrical strip of paper, which said
YOU WILL DIE BAEFORE YOUR PARENTS
. Dustin laughed. He grabbed a chocolate cookie from a plate on the counter and popped it in his mouth. It tasted like mud. When he looked up, everyone in the kitchen was watching him.

“Did you just eat that whole thing?”

“Yeah.” A quiver of fear traveled his scalp.

“Ho, man,” the guy in the motorcycle jacket said. “He's going to, like, end up in the fetal.”

“Happy trails.”

Breakfast looked at him with concern. “Just remember. It's only hash.”

Dustin nodded, to show he wasn't worried. He'd smoked hash plenty of times before. Yissel smiled in a friendly way, touching his shoulder and explaining that they were all going to have one, too. Nothing to worry about. When she picked up her own cookie, though, Dustin couldn't help noticing that she barely nibbled it.

He went into the bathroom to wash his face. He thought about making himself puke, but the idea of sticking his finger down his throat made him squeamish. Anyway, they were probably exaggerating. How could they know he was an experienced drug user? He walked into the adjoining bedroom, which someone had painted purple. The walls were decorated with kitschy Jesuses and taqueria calendars and black velvet posters of nudes with supernaturally large breasts. Two futons, stained with muddy footprints, covered most of the floor. There was a pistol on the dresser, a little price tag dangling from its trigger. It looked like a real gun. The tag said
IN CASE OF ABJECT MISERY
,
PULL
. Dustin walked across the futons and went back into the living room, where Taz was getting a tattoo on her biceps.

“Whoa, hey,” he said. “Are you sure you want that?”

Taz looked at him sweetly. “You said, Daddy. If I ate everything on my plate.”

The other people in the room laughed.

“Tell him what it is,” Suzie said. “A Gorgon!”

“It's a Gorgon,” Taz said.

“Fuck,” the guy giving the tattoo said. “I thought you said ‘organ.'”

“What?”

“You know. Hieronymus Bach.”

Taz frowned. “Like a fucking
instrument
? In a church?”

The guy shrugged. “If you want a Gorgon,” he said defensively, “you should speak clearly. Enunciate.”

“Let's get out of here,” Dustin whispered, leaning into Taz's ear. The party—the whole place—was beginning to remind him of a foreign film in which nothing happened but everyone was subtly deranged.

“Why the fuck are you whispering?” Taz demanded.

Dustin sat on the couch. On the other side of the room, near the stereo, the guy with the cotton ball up his nostril was making a mess of the records in the bookcase, pulling them one by one off the shelf and flinging them from their sleeves onto the floor. His eyes were big as quarters. Soon the carpet was covered in records, a shimmering pond of vinyl. He walked onto the records, crunching them carefully with his boots, stepping in a freaky, robotic way as though he couldn't bend his feet but had to rock inflexibly from heel to toe.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Suzie asked.

“Literally or metaphorically?” He peered around the room, as though surprised to find anyone there. “Literally I'm destroying all my records.”

“What are you doing metaphorically?”

“Wearing ski boots.”

“Grand Funk Railroad,” Breakfast said, watching from the kitchen. “
E Pluribus Funk.
That was my favorite record in fifth grade.”

They were an American band, Dustin thought, looking at the broken LPs on the floor. He'd meant to say it out loud, but a pluribus funk had entered his brain, causing him to mistake his desire to do something with the doing itself. His throat was dry, and he
was beginning to feel uncomfortable. “They were an American band,” he said, aloud this time.

“We heard you the first time.”

“Who invited this asshole?” the guy with the cotton ball said.

“He's Taz's asshole,” Suzie said.

Taz snorted, inspecting the half-finished tattoo on her arm. “No, he isn't.”

“She doesn't have one. It's a miracle of science.”

Dustin did not want to contemplate this. He was feeling worse and worse. Chiefly, his feet were suffocating to death. They weren't indigenous to his shoes, a man-made habitat. Carefully, he tugged off his Chuck Taylors and tossed them on the rug. It didn't seem to help. He pulled his socks off, too. This relieved the feeling of suffocation but gave rise to new concerns. He couldn't help noticing that his toes weren't equally evolved. Sprouting from some of them, black and weedy, were apelike vestiges of hair. He looked up, realizing that everyone in the room was staring at his feet.

Yissel began to tell a story about finding a cyst on her back when she was thirteen. The story was wiggly and hard to follow. As far as Dustin could tell, the cyst had hair and teeth in it and had to be removed before it got any clever ideas.

Dustin decided to step outside for a smoke. This implied a single step but in fact involved a series of challenging human maneuvers. Outside, it had begun to rain. You could see the swimming pool trembling under the lights. The rain made no noise and in fact lacked a certain credibility. In this way it was similar to the porno playing across the street, which in its sped-up form suggested a pair of emaciated, hyperactive clowns brushing their teeth with the same toothbrush. Dustin couldn't see the person watching: just a flabby arm sticking out over the couch, manning a remote control. Horrified, Dustin realized the owner of the arm was himself. By some trick of fate he was staring into his own future. He'd screwed his girlfriend's sister, but this only proved what a joke he was. Everyone hated him; he had no talent; he would never become famous. Hadn't a roomful of people just called him an asshole? There wasn't a person in the world who loved him. Even his parents, who'd raised him from birth, could care less if he lived or died. They knew the truth: he'd end up in a condominium by himself, watching porn with the blinds open.

Condominium
. It sounded like a flower. He imagined a humon
gous lily, actually saw it materialize in front of him and begin to take on the gloomy features of his father.

His heart had begun to race. He couldn't control it. A cartoon version of itself, wacky and unhinged. Dustin sat down on the damp walkway and put two fingers to his neck, checking his pulse like Mrs. Shackney. He'd learned how to do it in grade school. Measure for ten seconds, then multiply by six. He checked his watch, trying to follow the minuscule hops of the second hand as he counted the beats.

Two sixty-four. Was that possible?

Bravely, he went back inside and faced the partygoers, who looked smaller and less anatomically feasible. They stared at him in an expectant way. There was the sense that he would have to say something. If he could say something normal, anything to win them over, they might be moved to save his life.

“What's going on out there?” Breakfast said.

“The condominiums are in bloom.”

Taz's friends seemed to like this. In fact, they laughed so hard that one of them—the tattooist—spilled beer all over the carpet. It stayed on the surface for a moment, a stupendous dewdrop. Taz asked if Dustin was okay, staring at the fingers he was still holding to his neck. To his amazement, she seemed genuinely concerned.

“No,” he said. “Actually not. I'm having a heart attack.”

This was less popular. Dustin thought he heard someone boo.

“Whoa. Uncool. Death would be really uncalled for right now.”

“Dude,” the guy with the motorcycle jacket said, “you are
not
having a heart attack.”

“I'm not?”

“I've had one before,” he said proudly. “I think I'd know one when I see it.”

“How many of those space cookies did you eat?” Suzie asked.

“Space?”

She looked at Breakfast. “Houston, we have a problem.”

“Is your left arm numb?” Breakfast asked.

Dustin nodded. In truth, he'd forgotten it existed. What mental powers remained were focused on his heart, which was drumming so fast he'd stopped counting beats. It had turned into an alien creature. This was not his loyal, laid-back, intimate companion, but a stranger with a name tag.
my name is:
YOUR HEART
.
Dustin left the room, in search of a phone. He'd have to call 911 himself. But if he called 911, they would discover the drugs in his system and he'd be arrested for drug possession, even if his heart was attacking him. He was nauseated and afraid and his feet were bare. After a long and eventful search, he found a room with some futons in it. It seemed to be a different bedroom than before. Bizarrely, it was nearly identical to the other one, right down to the gun on the dresser. Dustin ignored the gun and picked up the phone, which bore no instructions.

He decided to call Kira. She'd know what to do. She was a genius in times of crisis. He loved her desperately; she was the only person who understood him; how could he possibly have thought Taz was worth the risk of losing her forever? He dialed the Shackneys' number. The phone rang several times in his ear, so slowly that Dustin wondered whether he would die before anyone picked up. Just as he was giving up all hope, the answering machine came on and Mr. Shackney's prerecorded voice barked into his ear, telling him to leave a message.

“Kira, are you there? I'm having a heart attack. My pulse is, like, off the charts.” Silence. He could hear himself breathing, panting into the darkness of the Shackneys' kitchen. He could hear it, too—the Shackneys' kitchen—breathing on the other side of the line. The sleepless hum of their Sub-Zero refrigerator. He realized that these might be his last words. He would have no other chance for forgiveness. “Kira, I have to . . . oh God, please forgive me . . . Taz is here. We're at a party. There's something . . . I can't even say it. The word. We did it. Your little sister. There's something wrong with me. A day before our . . . our anniversary.”

Dustin hung up and closed his eyes, waiting for death. His teeth were chattering. His soul was unburdened, but he didn't feel any better. He sat on the floor and hugged his knees. He wanted to walk out into the front yard and lie down in his father's leaf pile. He used to do this as a kid. He'd crunch into the warm pile and then burrow into the cooler leaves, toward the damp and nougaty center, which smelled of sweetly rotting spinach. He'd stay down there, waiting for his father to find him. It was dark and cold and scary, but you knew that he was coming for you. It was part of the game. He would rescue you with his big hands and pull you out of the dark, your sweater stuck all over with leaves, shaking you softly like a present.

Dustin opened his eyes: someone was standing over him in the purple room, one sleeve rolled atop her shoulder. Taz. It seemed possible that her face was turning purple as well, adapting to its environment.

“Please,” he said.

“Please what?”

“Help me.”

She looked at him unhappily. It occurred to him that the unhappiness was not solely because of his death. He had the distressing sensation that she was in love with him but would rather let him die than see it. But he was probably imagining this. It was the one inarguable feature of being human: you never knew what people thought, and then you died.

Dustin waited for her to leave, then picked up the phone and called home.

Warren drove through the rainy streets of Torrance, Dustin perched beside him in the front seat. There was something peculiar happening to his son. He was staring at the shuddery arc of the wipers, pupils full as moons, leg twitching up and down in hummingbird time. Now and then his eyes would snag on Warren—a wild, amusement-park look—before returning to the road. Hash, was what Dustin had told him. Warren found this hard to believe. He'd smoked hash once in college, before he'd met Camille, and the only effect was a persistent tingling in one foot. This was a different thing entirely. Dustin had babbled into the phone about his heart rate, something to do with cardiac arrest, but when Warren had finally gotten there—breathless and alarmed—Dustin claimed it had been a mistake. Warren had checked Dustin's pulse himself, just to make sure: seventy-two. He might have taken him to the ER anyway, but Dustin had gripped his sleeve so earnestly, flashing him such a desperate, pleading look, that Warren couldn't resist the chance to please him.